The present invention relates generally to filamental articles, such as insulated wire, stranded cable, or the like, that are stored and dispensed from a coil configuration, and, more particularly, to a novel design for such filamental articles that facilitates their dispensation from a storage device.
In the manufacture of many elongated filament type products, such as electrical wire or cable, it is common practice to wind the filament in a coil form about a reel that facilitates shipping of the wound filament and subsequent storing, as well as providing a mechanism by which the filament can be dispensed during manufacture to produce a specific product or by a retailer to fulfill purchase requests for specific lengths of the filament.
One example of a filamental type product stored in a coil configuration is electrical patch cord cable that is customarily stored in coils wound about 30" reels known as pay-off reels. The patch cord cable is frequently configured as two pairs of insulated conductors surrounded by an outer jacket. The cable is dispensed from the payoff reel and fed into a connectorization machine that cuts the cable into sections and applies connector plugs to the section ends. The existing patch cord cable is generally oval shaped with the two conductor pairs positioned side by side when viewed along a cross section of the cable. Unfortunately, this oval shaped design causes the cable to have a tendency to rotate, thus accumulating jacket rotations between the pay-off reel and the connectorization machine. As a result, the connectorization process must be stopped and the rotated cable portion must be cut out and removed. Once the rotated portion of cable has been extracted, the cable is re-threaded into the connectorization machine and the process is resumed. This exercise of clearing cable rotations occurs many times during the processing of a single pay-off reel, which carries thousands of feet of cable.
Accordingly, what is sought is a cable that exhibits an improved pay-off behavior by resisting the tendency to twist or rotate as the cable is dispensed from a pay-off reel. It is further desirable that the cable provide electrical characteristics that are equal to or better than those provided by the oval shaped cables used heretofore.